THE STORY EATERS OF YAMM

An oddball, unpublished SF novelist lands a job at a mysterious enterprise in Hincker’s novel.

Larry Palczewski is a diminutive, irascible, and chronically unemployed would-be SF novelist dwelling unhappily with his elderly hoarder mother, Dosia, and communing with his muse and imaginary friend, real-life legendary SF author Robert Heinlein. Among Larry’s many dysfunctions is Temporal Dysphasia (“I cannot use a clock. My mind is not able to process the concept of time except in very narrow cases”). Larry busies himself working on a novel, continuously revising and submitting the same manuscript to the same literary agent (a long-ago childhood crush) whose rejections Larry ignores. Dosia, who barters a bewildering amount of unwanted free junk via online classifieds, alerts Larry to a job opportunity: The shadowy Sky Company is seeking SF authors. Despite his chronic tardiness, resistance to actual work, and defiant plans to quit, the benefit of free food keeps Larry participating with a “cohort” of his peers—four other eccentric, unpublished SF writers. While they don’t clearly achieve anything, the group, especially Larry, earns praise for helping an AI compile an alien-invasion premise, supposedly for a blockbuster book. But the Sky Company’s CEO may be long dead, and even Dosia isn’t what she seems. Though the setting is greater Los Angeles, readers may be reminded of the madcap New Orleans in John Kennedy Toole’s classic A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), with Larry as a worthy stand-in for that work’s genius-philosopher-fool, Ignatius J. Reilly. The other characters are equally colorful SF-convention-and-workshop types who will be appreciated by the genre cognoscenti; there’s one fixated on terraforming, one obsessed with kinky alien-abduction scenarios, and one who can’t stop plagiarizing Ender’s Game. Hincker’s yarn is immensely fun, distinguished by a daffy and satirical wit reminiscent of cult authors such as Terry Southern and Kenneth Gangemi—though the conclusion sobers things with a Rod Serling-like twist.

A tasty and clever comedic SF send-up flavored with memorably unhinged characters.